Critics rally against event targeting homosexuality

Despite message, church group says it's not anti-gay

Updated 1:18 am, Sunday, September 11, 2011

About 70 protesters turned out in Sugar Land on Saturday to counter a controversial church group's popular conference on homosexuality.

Florida-based Exodus International hosted Love Won Out, an event designed to educate people on how to resist sexual temptation and homosexual urges, at Sugar Creek Baptist Church. About 450 people attended the conference, Exodus International's second trip to Houston since 2005.

Outside the church, dozens of protesters lined up near the Southwest Freeway to complain about the group's message. Exodus president Alan Chambers argued the group is anything but anti-gay.

"The fact of the matter, I was gay, the people who are leading these ministries were gay," Chambers said. "We know what anti-gay felt like. That is something we could never be. And so for us, because of our faith and because of our beliefs and because of our experience, decided we wanted something different."

The group holds the Love Won Out conferences four times a year throughout the country. And wherever Exodus International heads, critic Wayne Besen follows, gathering locals to protest the group.

Besen, the founder of Truth Wins Out and author of Anything but Straight, has been countering Exodus International's image of homosexuality for several years. "They present it to be a miserable life that is either going to end in death or loneliness or unhappiness and that's not true," he said. "You are entitled to your own opinion, you are not entitled to your own facts."

Dallas resident Katie Brown, a youth minister who works with children of homosexual parents, has been attending Exodus International conferences for years. "We are not hostile towards (gays) and we are not hateful towards them," Brown said.

"If they felt 100 percent that to be openly gay was what they were called to do and they're comfortable with that, I don't think anyone would tell them that they have to do something different," she said. "They should have the same respect for people who feel differently. "